One day after my Christian Victimology post, we have another example of victimology, this time about the oppression of conservatives. A conservative student thinks that he's being oppressed for his views because he did poorly on a paper he wrote that didn't even answer the question he had selected (yes, he chose it from a number of other possible questions that he could have answered instead if he didn't like this one). Outside the Beltway and Poliblog, both conservative political science professors, explain what's so awful about the paper. Given that he was from the Middle-East and may not have known English all that well, I would have given him a little grace, though most of the problems are with the content and not the language. I would probably have returned it without a grade , with an explanation of how it doesn't answer the question and a requirement that the student write a completely new paper answering the question (or one of the other ones in the original list).
Now it's true that the professor ought to be fired for how he responded to the student, telling him he needed counseling and so on (which may be related to some racist assumption that people from the Middle-East ought to hate America or something but may simply be an overreaction to a bad paper), and it might be worth knowing if the other assignments would have allowed students to take alternative views, but there are no grounds for complaining that the professor failed the student for being conservative.
